Today there are a lot of software applications for creating video clips from still images. The result of these programs is basically a video sequence in which the author is able to specifying the still images to be included and an audio file to be played as soundtrack. In these videos, commonly referred as “slide-shows”, the visualization order and the duration of each still image can be globally predetermined (e.g. 2 sec for each image), randomly assigned by a software or specified for each image by the user through an editing session often complex and tedious. Since digital cameras emerged on the consumer market, the number of pictures captured is constantly increased. In the film-era the number of shots was limited by the small number of frames available in a film roll. With the advent of digital photography, the number of pictures that can be shot quickly and at minimal cost has grown exponentially, providing the premise to transform those images into a video work.
As a result, many software applications were introduced for assembling a video by selecting a number of pictures in a given order and by specifying a soundtrack through a digital audio file. The result is a video that presents the images one after the other to a predetermined time interval established through an editing operation by the user.
This standard approach has two main limitations:
a) the user must determine the display time for each image “before” of recording the video (i.e. not in real-time), setting the duration of each image to be displayed before seeing the result;
b) this process, beside being not trivial, result in a smaller chance of syncing video and audio effectively, if the user is not an experienced professional.
With the present invention, the applicant aims at designing and developing a system and method for simplifying the creation of audiovisual contents, solving the issues described above and, unlike any other software, enabling the user to set the duration and the order of appearance of each image through an intuitive, inspired-by-music approach:
“Playing pictures”.